Astonishment, now, effaced her trouble. “You? Why?” she asked.
He smiled a little. “Well, because, if you’ll let me say it, I’m fond of you. I feel responsible for you. I’ve been too deeply in your life, you’ve been too deeply in mine, for us to disappear from each other. Don’t you remember,” he said, and he found it with a sense of achievement, ridiculous as it might sound, “how I held the tea-pot for you? That’s what I mean. You must let me go on holding it.”
But she could feel no amusement. She was pressing her hands tightly together in her lap, her eyes were wide and her astonishment, he seemed to see, almost brought tears to them. “Fond? You?” she said. “Of me? Oh, no, Mr. Oldmeadow, I can’t believe that. You are sorry, I know. You are very sorry. But you can’t be fond.”
“And why not?” said Oldmeadow, and he raised himself on his elbow the more directly to challenge her. “Why shouldn’t I be fond of you, pray? You must swallow it, for it’s the truth and I’ve a right to my own feelings, I hope.”
She put aside the playfulness in which his grim earnest veiled itself. “Because you saw. Because you know. All about me. From the first.”
“Well?” he questioned after a moment, still raised on his elbow but now with the grimness unalloyed. “What of it?”
“You remember what I was. You remember what you saw. You would have saved them from me if you could; and you couldn’t. How can you be fond of a person who has ruined all their lives?”
“Upon my soul,” said Oldmeadow laughing, his eyes on hers, “you talk as though you’d been a Lucrezia Borgia! What were you worse than an exalted, stubborn, rather conceited girl? Things went wrong, I know, and partly because of me. But it wasn’t all your fault, I’ll swear it. And if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had brought a note of anguish to her voice. “It wasn’t that. It was worse than that. Don’t forget. Don’t think you are fond of me because I can make you sleep. It’s always been so; I see it now—the power I’ve had over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is good; unless one is using it for goodness.”
“Well, so you were,” Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. “It’s not because you make me go to sleep that I’m fond of you. What utter rubbish!”